On tsunamis and captains

Recently, Economic and Political Weekly published a piece on the Anna Hazare movement and what it revealed about middle-class politics in India. For starters, the brilliant author added a cautionary note that the size of the middle class has never been appropriately calculated in India. If you go by income statistics, like we often do here in Pakistan, you come up with one particular number, (cited as 20-30 million in our case), and if you choose ‘values’ you come up with a totally different one. Given the fact that a holistic definition would entail both, the size of Pakistan’s middle class is definitely less than the oft-quoted figure of 20-30 million. The author then moves on to look at the composition of Anna Hazare’s support base and his movement, and came up with this equation (quoted partially). Please remember this is India he’s talking about.

Conservative Judiciary -> (Indira Gandhi’s emergency) -> Judicial Activists

Nehruvian Middle Class -> (post-liberalisation) -> India Shining

Further more, he disentangles the concept of a Nehruvian Middle Class by looking at their thought composition:

Ideology: Improvement in the delivery of services by the state.

Friends of: Other middle-class Indians who want this

Enemies of: Corrupt politicians, inefficient bureaucrats

Weapons: Facebook, Candlelight vigils, SMS campaigns.

Replace the term ‘Nehruvian Middle Class’ with ‘Zia and post-Zia middle class’, which, by the way, also grew as a product of economic liberalisation in the 90’s and, in a much greater manner, under Musharraf. The analysis, which is laudable in every right, fits almost perfectly for Pakistan, and this acts as a convenient point of departure to de-construct the Imran Khan phenomena as well.

Conventional observations of his support-base posit that Imran is the leader for the majority of the middle class. This class, as a function of its higher educational attainment, greater material comfort, and lack of proximity to the actual political class, is disenchanted with ‘machine-politics’ in the country, and because of that last characteristic, perceives itself to be disenfranchised. For them, the process of politics, in its current manifestation, is flawed because a) it is corrupt, circuitous, and incompetent, and b) it is exclusionary, or at the very least, doesn’t facilitate their entry into political power, the latter stemming from the very middle-class belief that competence is a skill exclusive to the educated. Imran Khan, with his clean slate, World Cup, and cancer hospital represents the best possible option to tackle both a) and b). For the former, his qualifications as a captain, and uncontroversial philanthropist, make for strong credentials, and for b) his rhetorical insistence on surrounding himself with clean people makes educated people think they have a participatory chance, and the fact that his suave demeanour, his foreign education and impeccable English, gives the middle class a slight reflection of what they quietly aspire to. This, by the way, is also partly the reason behind our collective middle class fetish of Jinnah and his Savile Row suits.

To all of this, add the lawyers movement, which for the generations born in the late 70’s, 80’s and 90’s became the arbiter of our national political narrative. The cross-sectional insistence on an independent judiciary, the participation of previously apolitical segments of society, and the tenuous, yet somewhat wide-spread consensus on constitutionality as a governing principle for the polity have defined Pakistan in the last three years.

In many ways, the judiciary became the representative of disenchanted aspirations, and Imran Khan has lodged himself as its poster-boy. Such explanations, while looking pretty holistic and by now, frankly, clichéd, are focusing on simply one aspect of the middle class, i.e. their perception of institutional politics in the country. This picture can only be complete when you look at their reading and understanding of Pakistan as an imagined community, and its place in the post 9/11 world. Both of these things, summarily speaking, are a subject of Pakistan’s long-standing quest to formulate a centralised narrative that, by some miracle, can also be federalised.

The problem here is that persistence of micro-identities, like ethnicity, provincialism, and even class to a certain extent, prevent the Islamic Republic narrative from being internalised. As a consequence, politics in one way becomes a contest between micro-identities and state identity, with political parties falling on either side of the divide. In this picture, the urban middle class, especially in Punjab but also in other provinces, is the direct consumer of state identity through the educational system and media, and its sustainer, having helped in its formulation since independence. This frequent insistence on ‘eschewing parochial identities for a unitary, holistic one’ is the refrain for middle class citizens and middle class institutions (judiciary, bureaucracy and the army), and is categorically visible in television shows, newspapers, textbooks, and even songs.

Following the polarisation of right-wing narratives across the world, the middle class in Pakistan, with half a foot in globalised culture, situates the country in one corner. In its perceived isolation, the identity of the Islamic Republic reaches out to its imagined ‘ummah’, hence fulfilling those polarising cultural prophecies that have emerged in a post Soviet and, more so, in a post 9/11 world.

Now take both, the middle class perception of institutionalised politics, and its perception of Pakistaniat, domestically and abroad, and then take a look at Imran Khan’s politics. He speaks with their voice, either by default or by design.

Imran Khan is, regardless of how big his rallies are, how many text messages or Facebook invites we get in a day, or how many hours he gets on our TV-sets, on electoral margins. People like Arif Alvi, who have the audacity to compare his politicking with the movement of the late-60’s, are missing a major point. Between 1966 and 2011, we have undergone 2 martial laws, both of which have pushed politics to the local-est level. It is the political economy machine that gets votes, especially in urban areas. While biraderis and tribes might still persist in some shape or form across rural areas, urban centers have ‘dharas’ or locally organised interest groups, be they trader associations, worker unions, or even neighbourhood collectives (mohallay-daari). To be politically relevant, a ‘tsunami’ has to be cross-sectional, cross-country, and very, very rooted. As of this moment, all I see is a leaky pipe.

The writer works in the social sector and blogs at http://recycled-thought.blogspot.com. Contact him at [email protected]